Mercury Prize 2013 – Listening trends on Last.fm

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With the nominees for the Mercury Music Prize 2013 announced yesterday, I decided to compile snapshots of the listening trends data displayed on Last.fm for all of the nominated albums. Last.fm (the company I work for) is a music discovery service which allows people to keep a record of every track they listen to on their computer, mobile device, or mp3 player, as well as supported music services like Spotify and This is My Jam. Last.fm then aggregates this data to compile weekly charts based on what people actually listen to around the world.

These snapshots show the number of registered Last.fm users listening to the nominated albums per week, for the last 6 months. Also displayed is the total number of plays (called scrobbles) and total number of unique listeners.  Although the Mercury Prize is decided by a panel of judges, I personally think it’s interesting to follow the relative popularity of each album, and speculate on whether that has any impact on the decision.

I leave the interpretation of the data to you.

Arctic Monkeys - AM

Arctic Monkeys – AM (6 September 2013)

Disclosure - Settle

Disclosure – Settle (31 May 2013)

Foals - Holy Fire

Foals – Holy Fire (11 February 2013)

Jake Bugg - Jake Bugg

Jake Bugg – Jake Bugg (15 October 2012)

Rudimental - Home

Rudimental – Home (29 April 2013) (also see the deluxe edition )

Villagers - Awayland

Villagers – {Awayland} (January 11, 2013)

The ‘Small and Agile’ approach – A retrospective

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I’ve finally gotten around to posting my honours work /dissertation for my final year at the University of Abertay Dundee, for my degree in Game Production Management.  It comprises of a dissertation proposal, the dissertation itself, and supporting project work which serves as a worked example of some of the concepts proposed in the dissertation body.  It was published in May 2008.

  1. Part 1: Proposal (The problem for Independent Game Developers)
  2. Part 2: Dissertation (Survival of the fittest - Investigating the survival strategies of “Small and Agile” game studios)
  3. Part 3: Honours project (Game Development Plan and Reflective Log)

Some five years have passed since I wrote this work, and back then the prospects for indie game developers looked quite bleak.  Since then, the games industry has changed dramatically — Angry Birds demonstrated the huge potential for small developers in the mobile apps market; the rise and fall of Zynga highlighted the potential and risks of Facebook as a games platform; Humble bundle, Good Old Games, and even Xbox Live emerged as reliable digital distribution channels for independent developers; crowdfunded projects on Kickstarter took off in a big way, resulting in the world’s first crowdfunded indie games console the Ouya.  Oh, and Minecraft happened. :)

At present, I feel confident that independent games development is thriving in a very positive, if unexpected way.  Yet, many of the problems and challenges surrounding Next Gen / AAA development reported in my original proposal are still present.  With the latest round of next gen consoles – the PS4, Xbox One, and Wii U – the costs of games development for the home consumer is unlikely to go down any time soon.  The business model, as far as I’m aware, is still broken, with regards the developer royalties. In particular, the use of Metacritic scores as another way to control and limit how much a studio earns is particularly troubling.

There are still development horror stories — L.A Noire was a critical and commercial success, but plagued by a protracted development schedule (7 years) and controversy surrounding poor working conditions.  In spite of the game’s success, the developer, Team Bondi, was shut down after failing to secure another game project.  What’s more revealing is the recent downfall of middle tier publishers such as THQ, and the closure of several notable development studios (e.g. Psygnosis), throwing doubt into the previous convictions that being acquired by a major publisher would offer financial security and was a viable end-game for any independent developer.  The Radar Group, which I had high hopes for, seemingly disappeared after 3D Realms ran into financial difficulties, and at the time of writing, no one else seems to have taken the concept of a production studio on board.  To be fair, why would they?  Having another middleman to share royalties with is unappealing to both publishers and developers, even if it does reduce overall project risk.

If asked on my views of the games industry today, I’d refer to Dickens and say it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.  Better games are being made, and there’s good reason to be hopeful.  Yet, there’s still much to criticise and past mistakes aren’t being learnt from (for instance, sexism in games / production is still a prevalent issue).

In closing, Scott Miller, who I used to admire quite greatly and referenced heavily in the above work, once posted the question “Who’s left who can design their own game?”  Back then, the answer was very few.  Today, it seems like there are plenty of opportunities for anyone with a clear vision, and the skill and talent to see it through.  Time will tell if the kickstarter bubble bursts, but for now at least, it seems like an exciting time to be developing games, and I’m looking forward to seeing how these projects develop.

Story telling in games

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This is something that’s been on my mind for a while now.  Story telling, recounting experiences – both real and made up – is something quite fundamental to human culture.  We tell stories to entertain people, to teach them, to inspire and challenge people.  Much day-to-day conversation falls into the pattern of listening to what people have to say, and retelling stories from your own life.  Even when we are asleep, a good portion of our brain is devoted to making up stories in the form of dreams – wild and fantastical.  Most organised religions are founded on stories from the past.

Like any art form, I see games as a medium for creating and telling stories.  For example, when you look at traditional pen-and-paper RPGs, they largely boil down to a group of friends making up stories. The game just gives them a framework for telling the story.

Gameplay, as a craft and discipline often gets overshadowed by the story and presentation; and yet I think gameplay design is at its most effective when it can facilitate story creation. Sure the vocabulary of the theatre and film transfers directly to games in terms of cast, set, props, and so on; but the best games create worlds, for which multiple stories and adventures can take place in (I’m thinking along the lines of Elder Scrolls, Minecraft, Journey, and probably MMOs like Warcraft as well).

Look at the new X-Com game that came out last year — there’s a game that has a very basic premise (aliens are abducting people, you must stop them!); but basically gives you a blank canvas to craft your own stories. As a game it plays like a modern version of chess (or more directly, warhammer 40k), with both you and the computer taking turns to move pieces, and the winner is the one that captures all the other pieces, or meets their objective. The genius of X-Com, as a video game, is that it lets you name your pieces, and customise their appearance and voice — it lets you turn them into characters. In doing so, players can reframe the events of the game, as a story. Every mission is just one episode in a bigger, personalised narrative, starring a cast entirely of your own creation. It’s compelling because you don’t have full control over the plot and you don’t know what’s going to happen next — characters can die, and the plot can twist in unexpected ways.  In RPG terms, there’s a games master (or story teller) in place to ensure dramatic conflict and uncertainty, whilst still allowing the player to own the story.

For me, that’s where I think story telling and games should go. Anyone can write a story, and then craft a game around it (yo). That’s fine, but I don’t think it’s using the video games medium to its fullest. Granted, you can personalise the story by adding branching plotlines, as with Mass Effect, but you’re still constrained by things like character arcs, audience expectations (Mass Effect 3 ending anyone?), consistency, and practical logistics.  Writing a good story is hard enough — writing a branching story makes things exponentially complex.

There’s always going to be a place for big, cinematic story games (nothing beats a well written, well told story); but I believe that games that allow players to make up their own stories are the way forward as an artistic medium.  I think that’s why games like Journey left such an impression — without a predefined story and no way to verbally communicate with other players, it forces the player to come up with their own personal interpretation of the journey they experience.  They can then recount that experience to others.   I think that’s also why Minecraft has become so popular — it’s simple to play, but has almost infinite potential for making up stories and games.

However, my growing concern is that we’re going to see a regression — instead of games, I think we’re going to see more “interactive experiences”.  Big budget, summer blockbuster entertainment titles, that you don’t play or explore, so much as participate in.  Modern incarnations of Dragon’s Lair (which is beautifully animated, but not really fun).   Again, on the scale of art and entertainment, there’s place for these titles to sit, but I think it would be a great shame if those are the games that get the most funding in the future.

Human’s are natural story tellers.  Our entire civilization is founded on our natural ability to recount events and characters from the past, and imagine and foresee events and consequences that might happen in the future.  As a game designer, I think we can make more meaningful, more impactful games by tapping into this natural instinct of interpreting and reinterpreting events as stories.  Instead of spoon-feeding people hollywood-esque drivel that would make even Dan Brown cringe; we can give people the tools and settings they need to create their own worlds and realise their own stories.  That’s something only games can do.

Community management

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What makes for a good community? Layout? Competitions? Moderation? Social sharing features?

Having done this line of work for over ten years (a career I find myself in entirely by accident), I’d say there is only one relevant answer: People. Or more specifically, interesting people – ‘Characters’, if you will. It’s easy enough to say, but I think it holds true: – the strength of a community is only as strong as the personalities that populate it.

Twitter is a prime example of a social community where interesting characters dominate, and are rewarded by followers. You could argue that one of the key hooks of Twitter over Facebook (at least several years ago) was the idea of being able to ‘follow’ and to a lesser extent ‘interact’ with public personalities.  Whether they have anything relevant to say, is another matter; but from my experience, interesting people are attractive and draw followers wherever they go.

For example, several years ago, when I was administrating the Alan Wake forums, I remember a particularly charismatic individual who arrived complete with her own set of followers.  I got the impression that she moved around the internet like a celestial body, collecting them as she travelled from forum to forum.  At the time I joked that these people orbited around her like moons, caught in the sheer gravitational force of her personality.  Where she went, they followed, and when she departed, so did they.  Thinking about it though, I believe the solar system analogy is a good one, as it stresses the fact that when someone leaves, moves position, or when someone else enters the community, it affects the people around them.

Most importantly, interesting characters encourage other people to participate in your community and become active members themselves.  Obtuse, obnoxious characters are the opposite — they repel and drive people away (and this includes staff/management – there’s nothing more toxic to a social community than an obnoxious person with supreme power).  So, when managing a community, my approach has always been to identify the dominant characters that inhabit it, to understand why they chose to spend their time there, and to facilitate their needs wherever reasonable.

With this in mind, you have to be sensitive to when they’re unhappy and considering leaving, because their influence will affect the entire system.   Some people are very vocal when they’re unhappy — anger and frustration are very clear symptoms that their expectations are not being met in some way.  Anger, in particular, can be seen as direct emotional response to not getting what you want; and therefore it’s good to get into the practise of finding out exactly what people want.  You can learn a great deal by starting with yourself — whenever I get pissed off and caught in the heat of an argument (and working for Last.fm, this happens more frequently than I’d prefer) I confront myself with the following:  You are angry because you’re not getting what you want.  So, what do you want? 

However, not everyone speaks up — prolonged absence is a good warning sign that they’re moving on, but you may be powerless to prevent this.  Certainly, in a large, multi-tiered community, it can be difficult to track the comings and goings of individual users, and you may not realise they’ve gone until, many weeks after, someone asks “Hey, whatever happened to…?”

There has been lot written on the topic of motivation, and the idea that people leave their job because they are either attracted to something new, or they have become dissatisfied (repelled) by the existing one interests me.  However, the exact workings of this depend very much on circumstance and personality, which are difficult to understand and predict.  In a general sense, I think you have to just accept that people come and go for a variety of reasons, and you have no real direct control over whether any individual stays or goes.

In my experience, most people don’t leave online communities in a grand departure, they just fade away.  In this respect, I would say that the best you can hope for is to keep the spirit of the community alive, by creating a warm, inviting, vibrant community, with enough strong characters to attract newcomers and keep things lively.  So, nurture your prima donnas — allow them to express themselves, celebrate community tropes and in-jokes, and give them what they need to be creative and do what they do best. Don’t go out of your way to stifle their fun when they’re having a good time. Learn to make exceptions for the greater good — because it’s their community as well.

I want to close this by stressing that when I talk about communities, I’m not just referring to online interactions, but any circumstance where people regularly meet as a collective group – work, school, clubs, and so on.  Companies are made up of people, and by definition each one has its own community — a culture formed from norms, values, roles, and ‘characters’.  I have used the word ‘characters’ to describe influential members of a community or organisation; some might describe these people as ‘leaders’, although I don’t think they necessarily are in the traditional sense.  Certainly these people can be charismatic and inspirational; but ‘characters’ I feel, captures the more intangible, quirky, and endearing aspects of their personality.  It’s also worth repeating that some dominant personalities in a group can be obnoxious and utterly repulsive; so perhaps a more academic definition would describe influential people in terms of ‘attractors‘ and ‘repulsors‘ — or some nonsense.

Regardless of how you describe them, it has been stated many times in managerial literature that the strength of any organisation is defined by the people that work there.  I would extend this by arguing that the strength of an organisation hinges on the strength of its community.  If people are what defines an organisation, then community is the glue that bonds that organisation together.   When these people leave, the company loses more than just their knowledge and work output (physical body) — it loses its community spirit (gravitational effect).  Their absence will affect all those that remain.

___

Personal note:

Working for a tech company for several years, I’ve had the privilege to work with people who are as eccentric as they are intelligent – brilliant minds with quirky humour and fascinating interests (one used to run a nightclass on lockpicking, for example).    Like any community, brilliant minds need a social space to flourish — one that not only accepts their culture but encourages it.   Some of my fondest memories at Last.fm include being shot at by a motion triggered Nerf gun; model helicopters flying past my desk; and toy sonic screwdrivers re-engineered to function as working presentation remotes.  These are kind things that make a company fun to work for, in spite of everything else they might throw at you.

Ultimately though, it always comes back to the people you work with – the people you spend time with.  Sadly, quite a lot of my friends have left over the last 6 months, and my fear is that as each person moves on, we lose a bit of our community spirit.  At the same time, I think those that remain have been brought closer together, which can only be a good thing.

Music

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I don’t believe in ‘good’ or ‘bad’ music, as such;  assuming an artist or performer is competent at what they do.  I’m not a musician, so I don’t feel qualified to judge.  There is simply music I like, and music I don’t like.  And it’s not a fixed constant – what I like today, I might not like tomorrow.

When it comes to artistry, I think there’s a place in the world for both art and entertainment.  I see popular music as as a doorway to discovering even more music — a foothold, if you like, to higher ground.  I don’t begrudge the entertainers of the world, because the best ones are damn good at what they do — they encourage us to dance, sing, and feel grateful for being alive.  However, I’m wary of those who try to pass superficial entertainment off as something deeper than it actually is.  Nevertheless, I think the best artists somehow manage to find a happy middle ground between art and entertainment (or accessibility), without compromising their integrity.

When it comes to personal tastes, I prefer to characterise music taste in terms of breadth and depth.  There’s music you know well, and music you’ve yet to discover.  Patterns you understand, patterns that are currently beyond your comprehension.

We  are really lucky to live in an age where technology can let people discover and explore music.   Let’s not throw that away.

HEALTH – Max Payne 3 soundtrack

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To round off the year, I thought I’d quickly take a look at my top albums for 2012.

Most of it isn’t too surprising, except for the Max Payne soundtrack.  What can I say here?  Obviously due to my modding background and past ties with Remedy, I had high hopes but low expectations for Max Payne 3.  It’s been almost nine years since the last game, and the idea of a bearded Max Payne with a skin head, shooting gangs in Brazil seemed wrong on paper.

Yet Rockstar exceeded them on almost every front — both in singleplayer and multiplayer.  Say what you want about the story, McCaffrey is in fine form and delivers some wonderfully cynical put downs (my favourite: “Rich parasites with delusions of humanity.“).  Maybe I just identify with bitter and broken anti-heroes a little too much these days.

But what took me, and clearly many others, by complete surprise was the soundtrack.  Of course, it shouldn’t have — Rockstar have proven many times that someone in their office knows their music, both old and new.  What’s evident though, is that they clearly understood both what made the Max Payne soundtrack work in the past games, and what was missing from them.

The first two Max Payne games were scored by Kärtsy Hatakka & Kimmo Kajasto, who set the tone of the series with dark, ambient pieces, mixing electronic, rock, and classical arrangements.  The second game also closed with a single from Poets of the Fall, a Finnish band who have continued to work with Remedy on their next game series, Alan Wake.

While I love these soundtracks, when it came to making new levels for them (particularly in Mona The Assassin) it became apparent that there are actually very few action tracks in the score.  Max Payne 2 literally has only one track , and as a level scripter you simply can’t use that one over and over again.  Considering that this is a game series that revolves around violent gunfights — mostly in slow-motion — it’s a strange omission.

What HEALTH have successfully managed to do with Max Payne 3 is carry over the dark, melancholic ambience from the first games, and inject a pulse into it.  From the moment you load the game up, the music immediately sets a steady pulse going and it never lets up as the action intensifies.  During gameplay, as Max takes cover you become aware of a drum rhythm, which then builds to a frenzy — mirroring the on-screen violence.  It reminds me of stories (I’m not sure of the origin) of warriors or soldiers driven mad, because of an unrelenting drumming sound in their head.  The drums of war, so to speak.  Certainly, when I hear it now, my pace quickens and my focus sharpens.

Modern game designers often talk about a concept called ‘flow’ — the careful control of tension and release in conflict based gameplay, which (if done skilfully) can heighten the experience.  Although it’s an obvious thing to do, Max Payne 3 is one of the few games I’m aware of that very consciously uses its soundtrack to manipulate the feelings of the player.  The audio is layered into the game in such a way that the transitions between chaotic gunfights and ambient introspection are subtle and go mostly unnoticed.

But it’s not just the use of percussion that makes the Max Payne 3 soundtrack great.  The game has many melancholic and reflective tracks, that evoke (for me anyway) that dark electronic sound you hear in 80s films like Manhunter.  For me, the more introspective tracks like Pain, Torture, Dead, Panama, and Future are the most interesting to listen; and as a whole, they give the album a sense of balance.  That’s important, because it feels like a complete music piece – a concept album – rather than just a movie or game soundtrack.

It’s not an easy album to listen to, and ambience and noise is always an acquired taste, but I think it more than stands up alongside other releases this year.  That said, it’s a dark album, and in the context of the game there are undertones of loss, regret, failure, violence, and self-hate.  This is the soundtrack to a man who indulges in self abuse, labels people as “chumps” and “parasites”, and unconsciously sets himself up for repeat failure — which he then wallows in.  It’s a soundtrack to a man who finds escape and release through being shot at.  In some respects, Max Payne is exploring just how far down the downward spiral he can go before reaching catharsis; and HEALTH’s soundtrack perfectly reflects the pain, anger, and conflict of a man trying to piece back together the fragments of his broken psyche, cutting himself on the shards in the process.

On a personal level, it’s a  dark soundtrack to what has been a surprisingly difficult year —  full of failure, change, uncertainty, doubt, and loss.  Bleak as this record might sound, it’s important to remember that when facing difficulties, the message is not to wallow in self-pity, alcoholism  and violence.  Max Payne isn’t an ideal hero, nor is he a protector — a role he continually miscasts himself as.  When stripped to his core, Max Payne is a fighter.  If there is a message to take from the story, it’s to keep fighting.  Keep fighting for what you believe in;  fight for change; fight for hope; fight to make a difference.

Whatever it is you think is important, don’t give up on it, no matter how bad things might seem.  A simple message, but one that gets clouded in the day-to-day haze of modern life.  This is something I learnt many years ago, and having faced absolute failure in the face on more than one occasion, I believe you have to match difficulty with the tenacity to keep on going forward, to never give up, to keep fighting.  This record somehow captures that sense of hope,  surprisingly enough in the track entitled Pain.

You can listen to the whole album on Spotify here: Health – Max Payne 3 Official Soundtrack